ANNOUNCE: Beagle 0.2.15

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.2.15.  This version
contains bug fixes, memory usage reductions, and a few new backends.
MS Word handling has been moved entirely out of process, which will
improve the reliability of Beagle for users who have had trouble with
.doc files.


THE SHORT OF IT
---------------

To download the 0.2.15 release or learn more about Beagle, visit
the Beagle web page:

    http://beagle-project.org


WHAT IS BEAGLE?
---------------

Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and
unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time.  For example:

* Files are immediately indexed when they are created, are re-indexed
  when they are modified, and are dropped from the index upon deletion.
* E-mails are indexed upon arrival.
* IM conversations are indexed as you chat, a line at a time.
* Web pages are indexed as you view them (with a browser extension).

Beagle supports many different data source and file formats.  For a
complete listing, visit:

    http://beagle-project.org/Supported_Filetypes

Beagle uses the Lucene indexing system from the Apache project and the
prodigious Doug Cutting, ported to .NET by George Aroush.

Beagle includes an optional GNOME-based graphical tool for searching
its indexes.

To learn more about what Beagle can do, visit:

    http://beagle-project.org/About


DEPENDENCY HECK
---------------

Beagle requires at least:
* Mono 1.1.18
* glib-sharp 2.4.0
* GMime 2.2.0 
* libexif 0.5.7
* shared-mime-info
* sqlite 2.x or 3.3.1

The GNOME user interface requires:
* gtk-sharp 2.4.0
* gnome-sharp 2.4.0

To support all of Beagle's features and file formats, you should
also have at least:
* Mono 1.2.2 or better
* Firefox 1.5 or Epiphany
* Evolution-sharp 0.11.1 for Evolution Data Server 1.4 or 1.6,
  or 0.12.2 for EDS 1.8 or 1.9.
* libgsf 1.14.1
* gsf-sharp 0.8.1 from
  http://primates.ximian.com/~joe/gsf-sharp-0.8.1.tar.gz
* wv1 1.2.4
* pdfinfo and pdftotext from xpdf
* MPlayer or Totem 2.17.1
* Galago 0.5.x  
* Linux kernel 2.6.13 with inotify
* An inotify-enabled kernel.  Inotify is in the mainline Linux
  kernel as of 2.6.13.


NOTABLE CHANGES SINCE 0.2.14
----------------------------

* Beagle now uses the .NET 2.0 profile and is compiled with gmcs,
  giving us access to generics.

* Support added for Linux's relatively new SCHED_BATCH scheduler
  policy.

* Infrastructure added to limit helper programs in terms of CPU time
  and address space using setrlimit(2).

* Disabled building the Thunderbird backend by default; it's too
  memory hungry and buggy at this point.

* Added KOrganizer and Konversation backends.

* Many memory usage improvements, especially with IMAP accounts in the
  Evolution mail backend and when doing queries.

* A rewritten and massively improved RTF filter.

* The MS Word filter has been moved into an external process,
  improving service reliability tremendously.

* Dozens of improvements to the filter code, including single
  instantiation of filter objects, reading smaller chunks of data from
  files, and other bug fixes.

* Fixed a problem where file attributes stored in the sqlite DB
  weren't removed if we later stored them in extended attributes.

* Removed the rarely-used Google backend, since Google stopped
  providing API keys.

* Install a greatly improved beagle-dump-index tool, for examining the
  data inside indexes.

* Many rendering improvements and bug fixes to the GUI.

* Translations:

  - [New] Slovenian  (Matic Zgur)
  - British English  (David Lodge)
  - Canadian English (Adam Weinberger)
  - Catalan          (Jordi Mas)
  - Czech            (Jakub Friedl)
  - Hungarian        (Gabor Kelemen)
  - Japanese         (Takeshi Aihana)
  - Lithuanian       (Žygimantas Beručka)
  - Macedonian       (Jovan Naumovski)
  - Norwegian bokmål (Kjartan Maraas)
  - Russian          (Leonid Kanter)
  - Serbian          (Danilo Šegan)
  - Swedish          (Daniel Nylander)

Contributors to this release: Debajyoti Bera, Joe Shaw, Kevin Kubasik,
Stephan Binner, Brian J. Murrell, Ed Catmur.

29 Bugzilla bugs fixed in this release: http://tinyurl.com/2qwuk2

Full set of changes:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_2_15/ChangeLog


KNOWN ISSUES
------------

The Thunderbird backend is memory hungry and buggy.  It is now disabled by
default, but can be re-enabled by passing in --enable-thunderbird to
configure.

There are some race conditions that can occur with certain combinations of
file system operations.  In very rare cases it might be necessary to stop
and restart the daemon.

At this point in development, we cannot commit to stable APIs or file formats.
You will almost certainly need to delete your indexes and start again at some
point in the future.